A key discussion point during HTAi's 2018 Meeting was how Health Technology Assessment (HTA) practitioners might borrow ideas from other industries or academic areas. Organisational learning (OL) is the study of how individual knowledge is shared within an organisation to become institutional/group knowledge. There are several models of OL, all focusing on how tacit knowledge (abstract, personalised, hard to define, action-based) is converted to explicit knowledge (definable, concrete, fixed, information-based). Effective knowledge sharing is crucial to leveraging individual knowledge to drive innovation, efficiency and effectiveness. Information retrieval is a knowledge-intensive field, with many processes requiring both tacit and explicit knowledge. Ideas from OL demonstrate ways to improve practice by increasing knowledge sharing.

Nonaka & Takeuchi's (1994) SECI model describes the cyclical process by which knowledge is shared. The model includes 4 stages: socialisation (tacit-to-tacit), externalisation (tacit-to-explicit), combination (explicit-to-explicit) and internalisation (explicit-to-tacit). Each stage describes how knowledge sharing takes place and highlights ways to ameliorate these processes. Information retrieval involves many elements that require or benefit from knowledge sharing and both tacit and explicit knowledge is required.

In the SECI model the Socialisation stage is characterised by face-to-face learning. Peer reviewing of search strategies, open dialogue and team working are ways of facilitating this stage. The Externalisation stage is crucial to OL. This can be seen as the practice-into-research stage; the results of successful experimentation, for example with search filters. The Combination stage is the easiest to understand. Communities of practice and inter-organisational networks can widen knowledge sharing and help refine or increase detail of best practice. The Internalisation stage is the hardest to conceptualise or measure. The extent to which guidelines become adopted in individual practice is one way to gauge Internalisation.

Information retrieval practitioners could benefit from thinking about ways to improve knowledge sharing. Models of OL can be instructive in this regard.